Striving for a realistic film effect

I love the second image. Are these your experiments?
 
IamAshlyRose said:
I love the second image. Are these your experiments?
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Yes, these are me trying to get a realistic film look with my 5D. Main things are the aforementioned shallow depth of field, saturated but slightly cooled down, bluer colours and you really need to push the exposure for bright highlights which still retain detail.
 
Which film are you trying to emulate?
 
The cyan/magenta fringing needs to be removed, and I'd probably underexpose and lighten afterwards so I can stop my sky blowing out.
 
why not buy a cheap canon film camera, an EOS650 or similar shouldn't set you back much more than a tenner and try a couple of rolls of film and see if that gives you the effect you want, take the same shots with your 5d and work from there.
 
puggie said:
why not buy a cheap canon film camera, an EOS650 or similar shouldn't set you back much more than a tenner and try a couple of rolls of film and see if that gives you the effect you want, take the same shots with your 5d and work from there.
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already on it! i bought an EOS 500 about 2 weeks ago and am currently running some fuji neopan acros 100 through it. The main reason for doing this is that i'm never sure how to process my general snapshots. I don't like doing utterly basic corrections to make it look basically correct when i could pick a film i like and easily replicate that. I'm having to edit images a bit anyway in lightroom so if i could do it by making up a specific develop setting then that would be good. I'm also giving DxO mark's film pack a go.
 
I'm sorry but the first image you posted looks, to me, like a pretty unremarkable digital photograph, the second looks badly fringed, over exposed and either soft, blurry or a bit of both.

Neither of them look particularly like film to me but perhaps I'm misunderstanding what it is about an image shot on film that you want to reproduce.

You mentioned DOF and sharpness, if you are shooting a 5D then you have the full frame sensor so DOF should be similar between your film and digital images, especially if you're shooting with the same lens. I see you said you've gotten an EOS 500 but I don't know that you are comparing your digital files to the results from that camera yet? Sharpness again would be down to lens choice and if your shooting a film EOS you might be using the same lens for film and digi or you might be comparing your digi images to other people film images shot on god knows what.

In my opinion the thing that makes film images so different to digital is that digital files are so much cleaner and crisper. But that could be due to the equipment I use to shoot digitally being quite different to that with which I shoot film, especially colour film. Most of the colour film I shoot goes through a Ricoh compact that cost me about £10, gets kicked around the place, has been dropped on numerous occasions etc.
 
so you want something like kodak ektar , but even more saturated ,then get an eos 500 and put acros through it ? what bit have i missed ?
 
I have been watching this thread with interest; I agree with brianwar on this, the first time I read the original post the first thing I thought was "these look nothing like film".

Also, don't forget that film reacts and behaves differently in different exposures - levels of saturation and colour levels will move rapidly depending on what emulsion is being used (or emulated). Additionally, it's not just about depth of field (although personally I never saw that as a film characteristic) - the rending of out of focus areas can be attributed to older lenses, so maybe slapping on a more classic prime with an adapter on your Canon might help as well?
 
If you shoot the same shots on film and digital with the same len it shouldn't be too difficult to then ajust the digital to a close-ish look to the film, save that as a preset and bobs your uncle.
Why not simply shoot film in the first place and scan those in?
 
The colour si about right for Ektar in the 2nd, but the dynamic range is nowhere near it.

The first isn't there, looks more like desaturated elite chrome.

Ektar is a weird film, you;ll never be able to make digital look like it because it responds so differently in differing situations and across single images, you'll never be able to smake preset for it.

Of all the films out there though it is the one that looks closest to Canon digital.
 
HBeevers said:
This is the sort of effect i want. I think i did ok with it if you notice the out of focus branches and how similar they are to mine.
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I'm not quite sure what you think you want is the answer to the problem. :thinking: Because that linked shot looks like a normal generic finish to me, any digital camera will do this as standard. ...its the light in the shot that's making it look so rich yet bright, coupled with good use of a lens, not really I'd suggest, much to do with the camera, or a film type.
 
Alan Clogwyn said:
The colour si about right for Ektar in the 2nd, but the dynamic range is nowhere near it.
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That's not really surprising as it was shot on digital. I'm not expecting magic and things like a limited dynamic range are things i'll just have to accept. But as you mentioned it's the colour i'm trying to recreate, how the ektar film renders colours as i find it so attractive.

I think some people may have misinterpreted this as me trying to do some hipsterish film effect with grain etc... I don't want that, i want to render my 5D's images with the same colour characteristics purely because i like the look of ektar so much.
 
Ah right, I have haven't I. ...I didn't think hipsterish I promise.

Your going to have to teach yourself the art I think, I've just been Reminding myself having a read up on how that filmed looked in general, it seems it had a kind of bias towards things like 'Blooming highlights' which in Photoshop you could use a soft-filter and selected areas to reproduce. Also something about the Cyan and Magenta mix that's characteristic, with reduced saturation in the mix, that's the tricky bit to gage Id guess. Try the colour match tool in PS which has a luminosity slider and a kind of desaturation slider.
 
Forbiddenbiker said:
Ah right, I have haven't I. ...I didn't think hipsterish I promise.....Try the colour match tool in PS which has a luminosity slider and a kind of desaturation slider.
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I'd completely forgotten about colour match, good idea.

Yeah, i'm not doing it to look identical to ektar film, i just want to try and get an ektar-like colour rendering for my images. I still prefer the clean look of digital.
 
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Alan Clogwyn said:
Ektar is a weird film, you;ll never be able to make digital look like it because it responds so differently in differing situations and across single images, you'll never be able to smake preset for it.
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This is the point I'm going to keep emphasising - not just Ektar, all film responds differently which means that by definition you cannot just "preset" any colour pattern, because it depends markedly. Additionally, some photos you may see of Ektar stock may actually be under or overexposed to yield a certain effect, rather than being a correct exposure of the emulsion. Without that information, trying to yield it would be difficult.

Not to poo-poo your efforts, but there are many reasons why it can be difficult to come even close to emulating.
 
Digital will always look digital, because it is digital. Film will never look digital, because it isn't. Good luck with your experimenting & all that, but you'd get the 'film look' a lot easier by using film.

What do you mean 'the clean look of digital?
 
Normally I'd say to anyone who was trying to emulate a particular film that its tough going and there are too many variables, but since this is about colours only, I'm struggling to give the same advice.
Now I'm not down with Ektar, to me the colours are saturated but also a bit garish, they don't seem to gel well together, so I'm going to use Kodachrome as my film of reasoning.
Kodachrome has a look, a palette of colours that are there generally in all photos shot in a variety of conditions, I don't see why this palette could not be recreated as an action in PS to give a Kodachrome-esq treatment to digitally shot images.
I dunno how to apply that idea to Ektar because Kodachrome colours appear to be global, in that all its colours look treated with Kodachrome magic, where as Ektar seems to render its colours individually, I think that's why I don't like it, they don't appear to be related to each other...I dunno.....that's the way I see it anyway.
I guess I'm saying, if it can be done with Kodachrome, it can be done with Ektar, but it might be a more arduous nut to crack ...:shrug:
 
New Fuji X-Pro1 has a lot of their old film custom profiles built in, Velvia, Provia etc. Though why anyone should want to do that stuff is a bit beyond me.
 
HoppyUK said:
New Fuji X-Pro1 has a lot of their old film custom profiles built in, Velvia, Provia etc. Though why anyone should want to do that stuff is a bit beyond me.
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Sounds better than calling it vivid or portrait on a menu :lol:
 
Wasn't there a piece of software available that allowed the user to click on a button to simulate a selecction of films?
My thought was to go the easy way and get hold of a cheap film body and shoot/scan the scenes on the chosen emulsion.
 
Nod said:
Wasn't there a piece of software available that allowed the user to click on a button to simulate a selecction of films?
My thought was to go the easy way and get hold of a cheap film body and shoot/scan the scenes on the chosen emulsion.
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Nik Software do one I think. I use their b&w converter, Silver Efex. It has presets for loads of films though their version of Tri-X looks nothing like the Tri-X I dev in R09 so I made a custom preset. And even that only works without tweaking on about 50% of images, the rest need tweaking or to be converted using an entirely different preset/film mode etc.
 
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